Big or small, talk to many music gear makers, and you’ll find they’re in the business largely for love. But it’s still amazing just how many gear makers choose to go it alone. They build equipment in their flats and garages, hand-packing their creations and shipping it to a world of fellow musicians. Koma Electronik is just one of those in the worldwide scene of boutique hardware makers. We’re especially fond of their interfaces and the company of musicians they keep. So, following up on the video that showed what it’s like getting a demo in a van from Koma, complete with champagne, here’s a more serious look at their process. Kristin Trethewey went to their studio to take a look around, and offers this profile – along with, in its entirety, a conversation she had about what it means to be in this business.

The young Berlin-based pedal producers combine effects and technology in sleek, black-and-white cases, with analog Control Voltage I/O. Inspired by the resurgent interest in modular synthesis, their effects combine multiple effects, as in the Gate/Gelay BD101 and the Filter/Sequencer, FT201.

One feature common to KOMA Elektronik is a patch bay that’s accessible on the face of the unit. This allows the user to directly input and output signals, playing with the possibility to generate new sounds easily. Ed.: Models like the Moogerfooger have similar ins and outs, but tucked away on the back of the unit, not on the top where they’re easier to get at. And, of course, lots of modular equipment has these sorts of ports, but not necessarily on a stomp-style effect. An infrared motion sensing system gives musicians the freedom to bypass the knobs, and control the sound with a hand, foot or any other object.

In 2010, the founders, Wouter Jaspers and Christian Zollner, took a pause from musical pursuits to work full-time on making KOMA a reality. Zollner, originally from Linz, Austria, studied social work at school, but consistently played in bands and had an inclination towards building modular gear. He still gets in a show or two with his band, Regolith. And somehow he also fits in an experimental online MIT course for circuits and electronics.

From age 17, Jaspers was dedicated to music. Although he also didn’t study anything related to music – instead working in Dutch and social science — he viewed his formal education as a means to expand his mind rather than his CV. He jumped into forming a record label, Vatican Analog, where he released his own records as well the work of as a growing community of other Dutch “anti-musicians”. This past-time became a full-time profession, taking Jaspers all over the world touring under his own name and different aliases. (Check out his music on SoundCloud.) In 2010, after five years of constant movement and music making, Jaspers decided to switch gears and focus on setting up a base. Soon after he met Zollner, the two decided to work together, and have been happily married to KOMA Elektronik ever since.

KOMA Elektronik’s mandate is to make “pedals for serious players,” but they also want to build a music community. They emphasize that this means more than receiving user feedback about their products. By hosting events and workshops, they seek to connect to a growing scene, playing along with musicians using KOMA pedals. They’ve moved to a larger and cleaner workspace in Berlin’s Neukölln neighberhood – a big step up from their previous home, living and working in a cramped, unfinished apartment. Bringing musicians to the space gives it a special, backstage kind of feeling. Here you could talk not only about gear, but also about music and travelling, common topics regardless of their various musical backgrounds.

This week the whole team made it to Musikmesse in Frankfurt am Main, the world’s largest music show. However, they skipped the booths. KOMA does things a bit differently, and as a young start-up, they often need to find creative solutions. This year they pimped out a rental car, dubbing it the “KOMA cab,” and offering free tours around the Musikmesse convention center. They followed up the tours with a big bash on March 22 at Silbergold. Celebrating their one-year anniversary, fellow KOMA friends Serena-Maneesh, Kaap De Goede Hoop and O Tannenbaum DJs played through the night, bringing a Berlin-style party to the generally-sleepy, buttoned-down Frankfurt trade show scene.

In the coming months, you can expect to see more growth from the small company. Aside from an expanding product line, they have further plans to substantiate their ties to both the Berlin and international music scene. In May they will travel to Poland to present workshops at the Asymmetry Festival.

Ed.: Indeed – the gear is great, but I look forward not only looking closer at that but also getting to know the Koma crew’s musical friends. After all, that’s what all this is about – and it’s the communities that form around all these makers, all you folks we’ve built relationships over the years, that’s why we keep doing it. Enjoy the weekend; go hear and play some live music, wherever you are. I know I will. -PK

Kristin has an extended interview she did for us with the Koma guys, on SoundCloud. (Some audio issue toward the end, but quite listenable.)

More photos inside the Neukölln studio. (All photographs: Kristin Trethewey.)

Koma’s stuff is good. Really good. So good, you might even want to watch a hands-on video where I’m juggling a camera in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. Their stompable, playable analog effects show well even in the back of a van circling Musikmesse.

How I came to see this hardware in the van is a story in itself. The trade show gig works like this: you pay an enormous amount of money for some sort of trade membership, then an enormous amount of money for a booth, an enormous amount of money to staff that booth in the form of hotels and travel, and then an enormous amount of money for obscure charges like wireless Internet that doesn’t work right and union staff to unpack your gear and so on. Exact details may vary, but you get the idea. For an independent maker, it often just doesn’t make sense.

Berlin-based Koma Electronik had another idea. “Carpet-bagging,” the term for using your badge to sell your product without a booth, is a strict no-no at these trade shows. But the trade show can’t tell you what you can or can’t do outside the convention. So, at Musikmesse, Koma promised demos in their “limousine” or “Koma Cab” – really a rented van outfitted with an amp for live demos of their gear. Since they’d saved some money, they could even offer free champagne and caviar. The system was easy: call them up, and they picked you up for a ride and some music.

Here, we get an in-depth look at two Koma effects, the FT201 filter/sequencer and BD101 gate/delay. On first glance, these may remind you of the superb Moog Music Moogerfoogers. But in usability and sound, the Koma boxes are very much their own beasts. I always loved on Star Trek: The Next Generation when someone would bark “disable safety protocols.” That’s the feeling of the sound here, whether controlled with your fingers, your feet, control voltage, or distance sensors – all appealing to modular synth lovers, computer users, and guitarists alike. In particular, the gate/delay is capable of some far-out effects, so if you’re bored with me and Koma’s Wouter Jaspers (come on, why?), uh, skip ahead a bit for some really wild sounds after a couple of minutes in the second video (below, bottom).

Kristin Trethewey has a separate look at the Koma crew for CDM, but for now, enjoy the videos.

Part one, above, shows the filter; the delay is below. We ask readers: which song fits this scenario better, Dragonette “Black Limousine,” or Ladytron “Back of the Van”?

http://www.koma-elektronik.com/ft201/

http://www.koma-elektronik.com/bd101/

AmpliTube 2 arrives today with new effects, recording, bounce to audio, export/import, practice tools, and in-app purchase of extra stomp modules. I’ve been playing with a pre-release version for the last few days. Combined with an audio interface like IK Multimedia’s own iRig, AmpliTube 2 turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a handheld, pocket-able workstation.

But let’s step back for a moment and consider what that means. What would you want a device to do for your music if that device fit in the palm of your hand?

Last week, I raised the question of physical size, inspired by a great quote by Sasha Frere-Jones – there regarding listening, not creation, but just as apt. The message was, in short, size matters. An iPhone is not an amp. But an amp – a big box designed for the purpose of making lots of sound – is not an ideal practice tool. So, one of the clear advantages of something like AmpliTube is the ability to plug in a personal listening device and just practice, complete with effects and amp sounds, without disturbing others. AmpliTube 2 accordingly adds news practice tools, by importing sounds and allowing you to adjust speed of playback, ideal for learning tracks.

But AmpliTube isn’t just for guitarists wanting a pocket-sized practice amp. With AmpliTube’s beefed-up recording capabilities and effects, it becomes a handheld recording sketchpad, not only for guitarists but anyone wanting to record, well, anything. That has two advantages. It’s mobile, so you can record in a practice studio without opening up a whole laptop. But more subtly, it can be a tool better-suited to sketching ideas and building the raw materials of a track than a full-blown DAW is.

Think of it this way: you’re fiddling with a synth, or playing a quick guitar line, or making sounds with a toy you got off of eBay. Sure, you could immediately open your DAW, but then you’re in the mindset of a tool designed to build finished tracks. For play and exploration, staying away from the computer, and using something scaled to your hand that you can carry anywhere, can be a big boon to performance. As we saw with Moog’s Filtatron earlier this month, having a tool that not only records audio but adds some creative effects enroute can be a whole lot of fun. Now, you can add AmpliTube to the same category.

Producers long ago discovered the advantage of the bounce: it commits you to making a sound that you can’t touch. With all that audio apps can do, that can be critical.

Many readers have complained that iPhone apps and the like win big on novelty, but don’t fit into their workflow. That means subtle additions – easy bouncing of tracks, easy syncing of files to and from a computer – are absolutely essential.

I also think feel like MusicRadar is asking the wrong questions:
Can you record a full song with AmpliTube 2 for iPhone? [MusicRadar]

My answer, personally: who cares? If we constantly compare iOS apps to their desktop counterparts, we can easily miss the point of both. To me, it’s more fair to ask, how is recording a song on an iPhone different than doing it on a computer? I hope to have some quick videos of AmpliTube and Filtatron in the next couple of weeks, but I find them terrific tools for capturing ingredients for later productions, and as companions to other mobile devices. Kudos to the blog Palm Sounds. Before the iPhone was even announced, that author appreciated the advantage of making things smaller, for creativity and practicality, appreciated that they’re not a different animal, not simply a replacement for existing tools.

AmpliTube is just one of many tools competing in this space, but with some of the potential of handhelds in mind, here’s a tour of what’s new in AmpliTube 2.

Record: A free, included one-track recorder tracks input, with or without effects, to audio. You can also add effects afterward. A paid-add-on (US$9.99/EUR7.99) will boost the recorder to multi-track functionality, as pictured here, and adds a master effects section with reverb, EQ, and compression. But there’s something nice about the simplicity of the one-track version, too.

“Re-amping” also means you could bring some raw field recordings or audio snippets and experiment with adding effects while on the go. (Better get some closed earphones if you’re doing this on your morning commute, huh?)

Bounce audio: Export recordings and mixes as WAV files or (for emailing) MP3s. That should resolve complaints about the fidelity of the output on Apple’s mobiles.

File sharing, import/export: You can import songs directly from your iTunes library, or use file sharing or wifi, making it easy to grab a song for practice later – or, for producers, perhaps as a way to sketch new ideas atop existing tracks.

…and practice features: Once you’ve imported, as you can see in the controls behind the dialog above, you can practice with the track. “SpeedTrainer” slows or speeds playback without impacting pitch.

New effects, stomps: Compressor, Reverb, Parametric EQ, Graphic EQ and Limiter are all available as in-app purchases. With all the versions, including the free ones, IK say they’ve improved the sound quality of the gear and ported DSP code from their Mac and Windows software, AmpliTube 3 and T-RackS 3. You certainly get top-grade effects, I’ll say that.

Presets/snapshots: You can now name presets. That means calling up favorite combinations is easy, particularly with AmpliTube’s grid-style preset layout, pictured here.

In-app add-ons, purchases: Taking advantage of a feature afforded them by Apple, IK now sell additional add-ons. Before that turns you off, the stock versions do include plenty of effects. What’s nice here is, you can pick out what you need. We could be looking at the future of audio software in general, though this does illustrate an ongoing complaint I hear from some users about iOS: they want to be able to mix and match effects from different vendors, just as they can on PCs with technologies like VST and ReWire. So far, that isn’t possible on iOS, though developers are investigating the issue. I have to wonder, at the same time, though, whether some of those restrictions aren’t creatively useful.

And the rest… This version also features 50 song slots for import and a setup panel with input and output controls. That adds to the existing features of AmpliTube for iOS:

• Tuner, metronome.
• 3 simultaneous stomp slots, plus an amp with effects, cabinet, and mic settings.
• Low-latency playback.

There are three versions; even the free version is fairly capable. (The free version also includes add-on support, so if you just want the four-track recorder, you can even add it to the free release.)

AmpliTube: 11 stompboxes, 5 amps + cabinets, 2 microphones $19.99/€15.99.
AmpliTube LE: 5 stompboxes, 1 amp + cabinet, 2 microphones $2.99/€2.39.
AmpliTube FREE: 3 stompboxes, 1 amp + cabinet, 2 microphones, free

Additional stomps are US$2.99/EUR2.39 each.

Stay tuned for some video; let us know your impressions if this is something you use.

AmpliTube 2 for iPhone

AmpliTube iRig (which, incidentally, attaches to the audio jack, not the Dock Connector – meaning you could use this and a MIDI adapter at the same time)

The Beavis, shipping now, offers everything you need to wire up 25 sound-shaping circuits, from parts to multi-meter to integrated breadboard. The OpenStomp Coyote takes a different approach, with a programmable processor and Windows visual patching software. Update: We should add in one commercial project to the mix, Line 6′s ToneCore DSP Developer Kit.

My First Guitar Pedal Electronics Kit

Via Music Thing, the Beavis Board is a beginning electronics DIYer’s dream. US$249 buys you a full kit of everything you need to wire up your own guitar pedals, newbie-friendly – no soldering, no parts hunting, no … actual thinking required. Of course, what’s likewise wonderful about that is you can tool around with all different combinations. The crawl of possible circuit layouts reads like one of those infomercials. (Just look at everything you get! Best hits of the 80s! Air conditioner repair!)

MXR Distortion + ● LPB-1 ● Brian May Treble Booster ● Gretsch Controfuzz
SHOw Booster ● Orange Squeezer Compressor ●  Muff Fuzz
DOD Overdrive 250 ● Fuzz Face ● Muff Fuzz ● EA Tremolo
Cigarette Amp ● Ruby Amp ● Noisy Cricket Amp ● Trotsky Overdrive
Atari Punk Console ●  Dual Oscillator Tone Generator
Boutique Tube Screamer ●  PWM ● Red LLama
567 Modulator ● Bazz Fuss
Mockman ● IC Buffer ● JFET Buffer

and more are being added to the list!

Brilliant stuff. It even comes with parts, a guide, and a multimeter included. I don’t think I’m allowed to add any more projects here, but if you get one, let us know how it goes.

Of course, this is all electronics and wires and stuff. We like software somewhere in the equation.

Open Source Pedal

If you were thinking in the previous description “yes, but imagine the flexibility if this were all programmable digital stuff instead of wires,” we’ve got the pedal for you. The OpenStomp Coyote-1 is an eight-core computer (or eight-“cog”, if you like), made of independent, 80MHz cores on the Propeller processor. That means it does all sorts of fabulous digital stuff:

• 44kHz, 24-bit sampling (2-in, 2-out)
• 1MB RAM sample memory
• USB jack
• RJ-45 expansion
• NTSC video out

– wait a second, back up here. It does video. You heard that right.

If this all conjures up images of stepping on a computer, worry not: the finished design will have some features borrowed from, you know, guitar pedals:

• Audio input and output jacks
• Stomp switches, control knobs
• Headphone jack
• Steel chassis

Someday, it will look like this:

But for now, it looks more like this:

More photos and discussion on the Parallax forum

But it should be worth the wait. You’ll be able to create custom patches graphically using a Windows app and exchange custom effects and patches with a community of users. We’ll be watching this to see how it develops.

Howler Audio Coyote-1, as seen on Livepa and via John Biggs on CrunchGear

Update: Lastly, I neglected to add the commercial alternative, the ToneCore DSP Developer Kit from Line6. It isn’t open-source like this project, but Line6 is certainly respected in their ability to do these things. The idea is basically the same: program the onboard DSP and roll your own pedal. (I don’t know that it’ll be as easy as OpenStomp; I guess we’ll see.) Here’s a video from the German Messe tech show in March, from our friends over at SonicState.com:

Why, we haven’t seen anything like this since the insane Jesusonic, which was rather inconveniently built into a giant crucifix before it made a comeback in software form in the beloved, absurdly affordable Reaper.

I’m guessing the foot pedal will be a slightly easier burden to bear.